DOASKDOTELL BOOK REVIEW
of LotharMachtan’sThe Hidden Hitler

Author (or Editor):Machtan, Lothar
(translated by John Brownjohn, notes translated by
Susanne Ehlert)originally in German

Title: The Hidden Hitler(The
Double Life of a Dictator)

Fiction? Anthology?

Publisher:Basic
Books

Date: 2001

ISBN:0-465-04308-9

Series Name:

Physical description: hardbound 434 pages incl. endnotes

Relevance to doaskdotell:Hitler and homosexuality

Review:

The author is a professor ofhistory in Bremen,
Germany. This book
appeared in Germany
as The Double Life of a Dictator and
created quite a stir when Machtan was interviewed
on the NBC Today show. There is another book by Scott Lively, The
Pink Swastika: Homosexuals and the Nazi Party (Keizer, Oregon:
Founders Publishing Company, 1995), that I have not been able to locate.
Basic Books is making Machtan’s controversial piece
available in a translation for English-speaking readers.

The underlying premise or
assertion for argument is rather simple: Hitler was a homosexual, at least a
latent homosexual, that some of the cohorts who assisted his rise to power
were homosexuals, and then, once in power Hitler, to cover up his “vice,”
turned on homosexuals with the most vehement suppression possible under the
Third Reich, with the most aggressive possible persecution in the
concentration camps and the eventual mark of the “pink triangle.” A quote
from Bluher (p. 238) rather sums up the flavor of
the argument:

“Where Hitler is concerned, it is not hard
to defined this. In his case the diagnosis reads …
orientation toward a fraternity. No one who has observed all this and knows
it can be in any doubt that Hitler thought and acted homosexually; that he
was a definite man’s man [the German is a play on “lady’s man”] who
transformed his original male society into a political party, and thus
founded a fraternity of unique proportions—a fraternity in which, under Ernst
Rohm;s direction, communities of young men and
couples linked by erotic friendships played a politically important role of
which Hitler was not unaware …”

And the circumstantial evidence,
documentation of his associations from his time as a failing artist to the
early days of his push to power, seems considerable indeed,
However there is little evidence that Hitler ever lived a modern urban “gay
lifestyle” as one would perceive it today. And military societies often
promote deep male bonding while trying to deny such bonding an erotic
component—a paradox that our own U.S. military faces today and covered a great
length elsewhere on this site. And the folkish
ideology that Hitler would develop would become rabidly collectivistic, in a
way not convenient for someone influenced by homosexuality in philosophical
thinking.

History is always trying to figure
out how any of a number of villainous historical figures hijacked a country’s
political apparatus and became tyrants. Today, we watch in horror as we discover
that Osama bin Laden and others like him (Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il) runs a huge terrorist underground in the third
world right under our noses. What motivates these people (power??) and why to
others follow them?

The implication of relating Hitler’s
rise to his alleged homosexuality would be frightening indeed.The suggestion would be that the
narcissistic nature of male homosexuality and its disassociation with the
“natural” urges for procreation impart an evil character that can have the
worst consequences. We heard the religious right make such charges in the mid
1980s in conjunction with the AIDS epidemic. Campus Crusade for Christ
evangelist Roy Abraham Varghese would make such a claim of homosexuality’s
intrinsic “evil” character in a dinner with me in the Dallas Bronx restaurant
in 1986.So the firm establishment of
the historical “truth” of Hitler’s homosexuality and its role in developing
the Reich would seem to invalidate my own whole life, after the fact. One
would be left with arguments about immutability. Except, that it is not
likely that historical fact on this matter can ever be made so clear.Others will present counterevidence, to be
sure.Gays would, at least, become to
ultimate victims of the Reich (along with the Jews and others). And there may
be a lot of jumping to conclusions in this book.

Nevertheless, there are enough
disturbing observations to note.Hitler was the “spoiled” and rather ungifted artist who was above more
mundane occupations. He was “above” more “normal” pursuit of women, perhaps.
It is unclear whether he ever consummated sexual intercourse.In the military, he would not distinguish
himself, and would curiously turn down promotions from corporal. There seems
to be a problem in some people that they are not satisfied by “normal”
courtship and family matters and seek power to justify themselves. But this
would be just as likely with someone functionally heterosexual.Many societies with despotic rulers
emphatically punish homosexuality and promote gender roles yet, from a
Western perspective, promote arranged family lives that seem psychologically
very weak.

I have always wondered what it
would have been like to grow up as an impressionable Gentile teenager in late
1930s Nazi Germany.I can imagine the
music slogans of German romanticism and the publication of an “Aryan”
physical idea (however unscientific or warped by modern standards) as
psychologically quite gratifying to homosexual fantasies.It’s not a very nice thought.

But may we need to come back to this.One’s homosexuality on its own is morally neutral. What one does with
one’s homosexuality does have moral significance.

This notion of Hitler and
homosexuality took an ugly turn in the Minnesota legislature in the Spring of
2003 when Rep. Arlon Lindner proposed removing
sexual orientation from protection in state civil rights laws, and then
brought up arguments claiming (subjunctively) first
that gays did not suffer in the Holocaust and that, moreover, homosexuality
led to the rise of Nazism and the start of Wordl
War II, apparently in reference to The Pink Swastika.He also claimed (subjunctive) that sexual
orientation discrimination id important to prevent America’s children from becoming victims of an
African-style AIDS epidemic.

One must bear in mind the other
side of all of this. The HolocaustMemorialMuseum has a traveling exhibition Nazi
Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945, and this small exhbit
makes many points. Homosexuals were regarded as threatening to form
self-serving sub-societies (which Machtan says
really happened) and blamed for reducing the Aryan birth rate. These are
arguments that are surfacing again today (and the “sub-society” argument was
used in McCarthyism-era purges of gays from the federal government.)